This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Fake News Is an Oracle — Cory Doctorow in Locus: Fake news is an instrument for measuring trauma, and the epistemological incoherence that trauma creates – the justifiable mistrust of the establishment that has nearly murdered our planet and that insists that making the richest among us much, much richer will benefit everyone, eventually. The contagion model for fighting fake news – replacing untrue statements with true ones – is like firefighting. It’s necessary, but it is responsive, even reactionary. The trauma model of fake news says that the fires will continue until we clear away the brush that makes them so easy to spark: until we address the underlying corruption that is rotting our society, fires will continue to rage. Simply put: if you want to make conspiracy theo­ries less plausible, you should start by stamping out conspiracies.
• Sydney Ember’s Secret Sources: NYT reporter hides corporate ties of Sanders critics she highlights — Katie Halper at FAIR: New York Times reporter Sydney Ember has a problem with Bernie Sanders—which may be why the paper has her cover him. Ember is supposed to write reported articles, not op-eds, but she consistently paints a negative picture of Sanders’ temperament, history, policies and/or political prospects in the over two dozen pieces she’s done on him. This makes sense, given the New York Times’ documented anti-Sanders bias, which can be found among both editors and reporters alike. The paper was caught making significant changes, without acknowledging them, to a 2016 article on Sanders hours after it went up: It changed the headline (from “Bernie Sanders Scored Victories for Years via Legislative Side Doors,” to “Via Legislative Side Doors, Bernie Sanders Won Modest Victories”); deleted a positive quote from a campaign advisor; and added two negative paragraphs. Even after the paper’s public editor chastised the Times for the practice known as stealth editing, the editors defended the changes because they “thought [the article] should say more about his realistic chances.” In its original form, the article didn’t cast enough doubt on Sanders’ viability and ability to govern, in other words.
• Today's Deep Learning Is Like Magic - In All The Wrong Ways — Kalev Leetaru in Forbes: Much like the world of magic, deep learning today is largely defined by practitioners churning out a steady stream of limited one-trick algorithms that are then chained together into complex sequences by developers to solve problems. Under perfect circumstances and fed ideal input data that closely matches its original training data, the resulting solutions are nothing short of magic, allowing their users to suspend disbelief and imagine for a moment that an intelligent silicon being is behind their results. Yet the slightest change of even a single pixel can throw it all into chaos, resulting in absolute gibberish or even life-threatening outcomes.
• The psychological reasons behind why Trump behaves the way he does — and how the American public can break free — M Jane in the Independent, on a personality type that I have personally come to know rather too well: There is a distinct and remarkable pain in the delusions of grandeur that Trump continues to press into society and, in turn, onto himself. His very specific need for attention, in any form, is reminiscent of a child of trauma. There is no safety — and no self — that is accepted and loved regardless of productivity or appearance. There is a threat at every turn — so, rather than build healthy relationships of accountability and mutual respect, there is a desire to subvert every social nicety and moral ethos because there is always the chance the carpet will be immediately pulled out from underneath his feet. His ongoing and persistent belief [in] winning by any means necessary is the rhetoric of someone who cannot survive a perceived loss. How fragile the form that insists it never feels the pain of loss. This fragility is, of course, mirrored in equal parts to the ego. The larger and more ominous the ego appears, the deeper and weaker is the core self. The smallest of blows is then taken deeply and personally, and the speed and ferocity in which he must lash out in order to recover is imperative to preserve the tenuous mirage of strength and power.
• What the Measles Epidemic Really Says About America — Peter Beinart: Our amnesia about vaccines is part of a broader forgetting. Prior generations of Americans understood the danger of zero-sum economic nationalism, for instance, because its results remained visible in their lifetimes. When Al Gore debated Ross Perot about NAFTA in 1993, he reminded the Texan businessman of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which raised tariffs on 20,000 foreign products—prompting other countries to retaliate, deepening the Great Depression, and helping to elect Adolf Hitler. But fewer and fewer people remember the last global trade war. Similarly, as memories of Nazism fade across Europe and the United States, anti-Semitism is rising. Technology may improve; science may advance. But the fading of lessons that once seemed obvious should give pause to those who believe history naturally bends toward progress.